A pleasant dose of alternate-universe excitement.
A teenage girl and her friends cross into a parallel world in this fantasy adventure from Blossman (The Noxhelm Murders, 2017, etc.).
Seventeen-year-old Ella Simmons lives with her strict father in the small town of Branford Falls. Her wealthy best friend Finley Poe’s dad recently bought her an antique mirror for $10,000. When Ella, Finley, and their new friend, Diane Brooke, try to see their future in the looking glass, they find they can pass through it. The world beyond is an alternate version of Branford Falls, full of destitution, violence, and even casual murder. They manage to escape back to their own reality, but Ella finds that being in the “Dark World,” as she calls it, made her feel good. It also made the strange birthmark on her shoulder glow and awakened strange powers within her. It turns out that whenever someone from her own world passes into the Dark World, a doppelgänger from that reality travels in the other direction—and Finley’s double has wreaked havoc in her absence. Also, Finley’s delinquent brother Fallon followed them into the mirror; he’s now trapped in the Dark World, replaced in his own by an even more aggressive sociopath. In the midst of all this, Ella finds out that she was adopted. What is her true connection to the Dark World? Blossman establishes a fast pace from the outset, confronting Ella in every chapter with problems, mysteries, dangers, and doubts. The author has Ella tackle these with a teenager’s resilience and a breezy insouciance—and the latter trait is shared by superficial socialite Finley. Ella consistently grasps the gravity of her situation but doesn’t excessively dwell on her inner turmoil. This is a wise stylistic choice on Blossman’s part, as it keeps the tone of the adventure light. The dialogue, too, has a reassuring staginess that acts as a buffer for particularly unpleasant plot points. Throughout, the protagonist’s appealing narration offers an array of breathless fantasy twists.
A pleasant dose of alternate-universe excitement.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-599284-5
Page Count: 217
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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